Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Trump fails to learn from it or to learn anything

President Joe Biden will return to Washington, D.C. after a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. About 2,000 Americans who died in WWI lie buried there. Donald Trump refused to pay his respects during his presidency because a) rain might mess up his hair, and b) he viewed the dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” (Associated Press):

It’s a fitting end to five days in which Trump was an unspoken yet unavoidable presence. On the surface, the trip marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day and celebrated the alliance between the United States and France. But during an election year when Trump has called into question fundamental understandings about America’s global role, Biden has embraced his Republican predecessor — and would-be successor — as a latent foil.

Every ode to the transatlantic partnership was a reminder that Trump could upend those relationships. Each reference to democracy stood a counterpoint to his rival’s efforts to overturn a presidential election. The myriad exhortations to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia created a contrast with Trump’s skepticism about providing U.S. assistance.

Biden’s paeans to the struggle between democracy and autocracy drew plaudits in Europe, where the prospect of a return to Trump’s turbulent reign has sparked no shortage of anxiety. But it remains to be seen how the message will resonate with American voters, as Biden’s campaign struggles to connect the dire warnings the Democratic president so often delivers about his rival with people’s daily concerns.

Americans are so busy with quotidian concerns that many have tuned out the news. As recent reports tell it, many are unaware of Trump’s recent convictions on 34 felony counts. How they managed to avoid that news is beyond news junkies such as ourselves, but there it is.

“The autocrats of the world are watching closely,” Biden said in his 80th D-Day commemoration speech, even if Americans are to busy to. Susan Glasser observes (The New Yorker):

While listening to Biden’s speech, I thought about a resignation letter that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by Trump, wrote but did not send to him in 2020. “It is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945,” Milley said in the letter, a draft of which I obtained in the course of writing a book on the Trump Presidency. “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”

Biden did not have to mention any of this to make it the inescapable context of his remarks on Thursday. “To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable,” Biden told the audience pointedly, adding, “Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.” And yet so much forgetting has happened, and I am not thinking here about the lessons of the past century as much as I am about the lessons of just one four-year Presidential term ago. Does anyone still remember Trump in Helsinki in 2018, tripping over himself as he took Putin’s word over that of America’s intelligence agencies? Or Trump in France, for another set of world-war commemorations later that year, fresh off midterm-election losses and skipping a cemetery visit because he reportedly did not want to get his hair wet? Or Trump, in 2019, blackmailing Ukraine’s young new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, by holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance needed to fight off Russia as he demanded Zelensky dig up dirt on Biden?

It is thinkable, then, all too thinkable. At the time of Biden’s speech, the polling averages showed Trump slightly ahead of him. What will happen to Ukraine if he should win?

Trump is more concerned with exacting retribution on “the enemy within” and has no time for warnings in the historical record. His focus is himself. He nevertheless cloaks his plans in the same rhetoric of the fascism-curious America First movement of the 1930s. The enemy within was not an idle comment from his Time interview, Glasser writes, “but a theme of his campaign—the theme of his campaign.”

Biden must have read Trump’s interview, too, as preparation for his own. It clearly informed his passionate case for why Trump is a danger to the international order, his focus on the threat posed by Russia—Trump, in his own interview, had bragged about how well he got along with Putin—and his best off-the-cuff line: “All the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man. Not a joke.”

Neither stirring battlefield rhetoric nor snarky one-liners, though, can explain how Biden can extract himself from his current predicament, running dead even at best against a felonious ex-President who diminishes the threats from America’s adversaries abroad because he is consumed by purging disloyal citizens at home. Tell that to the boys of Pointe du Hoc. I don’t think they’d believe it.

They’d be turning over in their graves at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery Trump refused to visit.

I still believe (and I hope it’s not naive) that Trump is bleeding support and it’s just not showing up yet in the polls.

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I couldn’t help but think that Kimberly may have just realized that she bet on the wrong horse.

The story in the NY Times takes apart their ridiculous claim, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now. Millions of people no doubt believe that the FBI tried to assassinate Donald Trump now. The lies just pile on top of each other. It’s good to see the Times calling it like it is.

There’s a certain hysteria about the GOP’s talking points right now that indicted a lack of confidence in their candidate. That’s understandable since their candidate is a convicted felon who is also a narcissistic pathological liar. But still, lately they’ve been completely out of their minds.

The reaction to he verdict is the best example. They went completely over the top — all of them — complaining that it was a partisan prosecution and a political verdict. It was clearly coordinated to try to intimidate the Democrats into being afraid to use it in the campaign. (That’s not going to work — I hope.)

Just yesterday they all went nuts over a random post by a self-professed “shit-poster” on facebook who had written a post before the verdict saying tat his cousin was on the jury and told him they were going to convict. This was brought to the attention of the judbge who said they will hold a hearing on it. But it was obviously a hoax which the shitposter himself admitted. That didn’t stop Fox News and the entire right wing media from having a complete meltdown over it and demanding a mistrial. Trump himself got in on the action.

They are working their voters up into a paranoid frenzy and I think we all know where that’s going to lead if he loses in November. It’s incredibly irresponsible but that’s the definition of the Republican party in the 2020s.

It’s not the Democrats

MSNBC reports:

Cornel West’s independent presidential campaign is broke. His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access. And he spent more on graphic design than petition-gathering in his most recent campaign finance report.

But tens of thousands of signatures have been gathered on behalf of the famed left-wing academic in key states thanks to self-organized grassroots volunteers — and some help from outside operatives tied to a Republican consulting firm.

[…]

Emails from elections officials, obtained through a request under North Carolina’s Public Records Law, show the pro-West Justice for All Party authorized three people to pick up and drop off signatures for them statewide — and all three are current or past employees of a Colorado-based Republican political firm called Blitz Canvassing.

Blitz Canvassing has worked for numerous Republican House and Senate candidates and took in more than $14.6 million in payments working for Never Back Down, the main super PAC that supported former GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to campaign finance reports.

“In the same way that Republicans have quietly pushed ballot access for the Green Party across the country for years, there’s concrete evidence — not rumors, but evidence — in North Carolina and in other states of an organized Republican effort to get Cornel West on ballots, using Republican consultants and vendors that the West campaign is not paying for,” said Pete Kavanaugh, who founded Clear Choice Action, a new Democratic super PAC working to combat third-party candidates.

West could do something about this, of course. He could withdraw from the race. But they’d just work for one of the other freedom saboteurs so I’m not sure it makes a difference.

This is not a grassroots operation. Someone is paying for it. And those someones are Republicans. I’d really like to see the press in general take a page out of MSNBC’s book here and do some in depth reporting on GOP shenanigans for once. Trump’s relentless accusations that Democrats are rigging the elections is projection as usual.

Update:

You want rigging? I’ll give you rigging. This one concerns a US Senator– Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. He was up to his neck in the fake electoral scheme and lied about it.

As I’ve been watching the D-Day commemorations the last few days it’s obviously brought up thoughts about the history of our alliances in Europe and why they have been so important. The idea that the United States can withdraw behind its borders and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist has been proven wrong over and over again. We may not want to participate with the rest of the world but it certainly wants to participate with us, one way or the other.

The first half of the last century was cataclysmic and the relative peace of the second half was largely achieved by recognizing the fact that closing your eyes to everything but your own domestic concerns never works. Being the world’s only superpower certainly makes that impossible.

Allowing ignoramuses like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene to be in charge of such an awesome responsibility is one of the most reckless acts in human history.

All the greatest hits

Onward radical constitutionalists

In his early years in stand-up comedy, the late George Carlin played more with observational humor, mocking, for example, the internal contradiction in the term “jumbo shrimp.”

What to make now of “radical constitutionalism” (Washington Post):

A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’sbudget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”

He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office.

And they called 1960s yippies radicals for having long hair, beards, and for wearing the American flag. Guess they won that culture war. Vought seemingly hasn’t noticed.

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”

Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.

Tell the guy in the Filipkowski tweet above that he’s out of step with the New Trump Order and in need of correction.

From the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from Vought’s remarks and Center for Renewing America correspondence, what seems obvious is that these proud Christian nationalists believe that they can steer Trump’s agenda in his second term. They believe they can control him the way the Weimar boys “persisted in their delusion that they could control” the loudmouth Austrian with the funny moustache and yet “preserve the ‘guardrails’ that would contain him.” You know, they’ll help Trump exact retribution on his growing enemies list and he, in turn, will help them turn the United States into Gilead, a glorious, new Christian reich.

The Post recounts the failure of people like Vought to get what they wanted from the first Trump administration. But this time it will be different, no doubt about it.

Vought’s long careeras a staffer in Congress and at federal agencies has made himan asset to Project 2025, an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. Vought wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president in Project 2025’s 920-page blueprint, and he is developing its playbook for the first 180 days, according to the people involved in the effort.

“We’re going to plant the flags now,” Vought told Trump’s former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on his far-right podcast. “It becomes a new governing consensus of the Republican Party.”

Maybe everyone will be ordered to wear two shirts instead of armbands.

As Vought and other Trump allies work on blueprints for a second term,he is pushing a strategy he calls “radical constitutionalism.” The left has discarded the Constitution, Vought argues, so conservatives need to rise up, wrest power from the federal bureaucracy and centralize authority in the Oval Office.

“Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins,” he wrote in the 2022 essay. “It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”

In practice, that could mean reinterpreting parts of the Constitution to achieve policy goals — such as by defining illegal immigration as an “invasion,” which would allow states to use wartime powers to stop it.

“We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote. “This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

As radical as Benedict Arnold, if that’s what it takes. He was an original too.

Vought’s views amount to a kind of Anglo-Protestant cultural supremacism, said Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown University professor who published a book critiquing Christian nationalism.

“The Civil War taught us that America is big and broad and strong enough to include non-Christians and non-Whites,”Miller wrote in an email to The Post. “It also should have taught us that the greatest threat to the American vision are racial and religious supremacists.”

Update: Replaced original image containing copyright watermark.

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Revenge is mine

The Republican Party might actually draft a platform in 2024 for the first time in eight years. And a “Stop the Steal” election denier will lead them (The New Republic):

On May 15, Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was hired to serve as the ​​deputy policy director of the platform committee, reported NBC News. Martin is well known for supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even giving a speech in Washington, D.C., the day before the January 6 Capitol riots in 2021 to rally Trump’s supporters.

“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said in that speech. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day till we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”

Well. Echoes of Gone with the Wind.

Of course, “true Americans” is a euphemism in an organization imbued with the spirit of the convicted criminal of the hour, The Man of 30,000 Lies.

The New Republic adds, “Martin’s appointment suggests that 2024’s platform will include challenging the integrity of any election that Republicans lose.”

Yes, but what else might that platform include? What all-American value might lie at the heart of a platform worthy of a man who thinks only of himself?

ABC News offers a clue:

Former President Donald Trump continues to center his third presidential campaign on retribution against his political allies, saying in a recent interview that at times revenge is “justified” — comments that President Joe Biden’s campaign seized on Friday to point to Trump’s focus on personal and political retribution.

[…]

In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw — best known as “Dr. Phil,” Trump was asked about his calls for retribution, and his claims of taking action against some political opponents. Though Trump originally said he would work on forgiving and forgetting, he quickly changed his tune after McGraw, referencing the pope, said forgiveness was necessary in order to avoid revenge.

“Well revenge does take time. I will say that, and sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in the interview that aired Thursday night.

Justified: Donald Trump is Raylan Givens, a tough deputy U.S. Marshal enforcing his own brand of justice. Except deputy is below convict Trump’s station and he’s prohibited from owning a gun. Whateva.

“You know the word ‘revenge’ is a very strong word, but maybe we have revenge for success. But that’s what I’d like to see. I want to see the country survive, because this country is not going to survive like this.”

Revenge For Success could be Trump’s next slapdash, ghost-written volume on screwing your neighbors. (Make sure that gets into the platform, Ed, if it takes your last breath before you go home to the Lord, justified.)

Imagine the acceptance speech Trump might give next month (with a few minor edits):

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . retribution today . . . retribution tomorrow . . . retribution forever.

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Lion Cubs!

London Zoo’s three Asiatic lion cubs have been pictured taking their first steps outside with mother Arya.

The 8-week-old cubs appeared tentative at first, looking to mum for reassurance, but were soon spotted skipping around their Indian-inspired habitat, chasing each other and playing with mum’s tail.

The cubs, born on 13 March 2024, have so far spent their time cosied up in their special indoor cub dens with mum. The trio are yet to be sexed, and this will happen during their first health check later this month. From their first moments of nursing to their playful antics inside the den, every development has been closely monitored by zookeepers and captured on the zoo’s hidden “cubcam”.

The three cubs are an important addition to the conservation breeding programme, which safeguards a healthy population of the Critically Endangered species. Surviving only in the Gir Forest in Gujarat, India, the wild population is particularly vulnerable to disease or natural disaster. Recent population estimates suggest that only 600 to 700 individuals remain in the wild.